Best of all, he got thirty-six seconds on the evening news. He had a video of the newsbreak showing him answering questions put to him by a reporter as he left the scene of the shooting, and for years afterward, he’d pop it into the VCR, usually when he’d had a few bombs.
Jack Mulloy, a brave officer whose quick thinking in the face of danger saved his partner’s life. Hot shit.
The second time he used his gun in combat hadn’t been nearly as satisfying. It had been the opposite, in fact, because it marked the beginning of the end of his career.
The scene was a tenement in Spanish Harlem, a burned-out hulk where dealers operated a druggies’ flea market. It wasn’t even Mulloy’s operation. He’d gotten mixed up in it because he was working on a homicide out of Midtown South and a tip had come in on a guy wanted in the case. The suspect was a Dominican, part of the crew that did business in the building. The cops raided the place and Mulloy went along.
Ordinarily, he would have stayed as far away as possible. Dealers sometimes got high on their own wares, and there was nothing worse than some wild-assed Hispanic who’d been running dope in his arm. Even clean, they were bad enough.
But the taste of glory had been wonderful the first time, and it had also been years since he’d made a big score. He was sure that this one could bump him up a grade, which would mean more money and maybe even another spot on TV. Worth it.
But it wasn’t.
The thing was a total fuckup, from the minute the cops went in. They were all in vests and helmets, some of them carrying shields; heavily armed with pistols and shotguns. The trouble was, so were the bad guys.
Mulloy was on the ground floor, behind the others. He was wearing a vest but carrying nothing but the Colt. His plan was to wait for the action to die down and then claim his man if the suspect was there.
Instead, he was caught in a crossfire, deafened by the roar of gunshots, cordite burning his nostrils, his eyes filled with tears from the thick smoke. He fired his pistol at a dim form and the target went down. Mulloy stepped back, and that was when he went through the floor.
For an instant, he was weightless, floating in the darkness. Then came the tremendous shock as he hit.
The pain was incredible. He was in the cellar, lying on his back in a pool of filthy water, and somebody was screaming. After a time, he realized the cries were his own, and he clamped his jaws together to shut off the sound. From above him came the rattle of more gunfire. He put his hand down onto his right leg and felt torn cloth, touched the jagged ends of bone. After that he passed out.
This time, he didn’t make TV. He spent four months in Bellevue and over the following year underwent two lengthy operations to repair the damage to his leg. By the time he was able to hobble around, the shoot-out had long been forgotten, at least by the public and the media. Other drug busts had taken place, other shootings had occurred, other perpetrators had been killed. Mulloy did pick up another citation, but he stayed in grade.
That was when he’d made his decision. He turned down a generous job offer from his brother-in-law, the prick, and moved into a rubber-gun assignment in the DA’s office. Because the way he saw it, being half a detective was better than being none at all.
And now? He couldn’t believe his good fortune. This guy Tolliver had come out of nowhere. The lieutenant was a straight arrow, with a big rep—a tough cop who wouldn’t be pushed around by Captain Brannigan or Fletcher Shackley or anyone else. Not only was he looking into the deaths of the senator and the Silk woman, but he was also determined to dig deep into the Cunningham investigation and to root out the answers.
Tolliver was smart, too. He’d already put his finger on a number of key questions concerning the brokerage.
Would Mulloy help? Goddamn right he would. It’d be risky, of course—Brannigan would destroy him if what he was doing came to light. But what an opportunity. If he played it right, he could be rolling again.
The Dead were on now, doing “Sugar Magnolia.” Mulloy sang along with that one, too, suddenly realizing he was almost home.
25
The trip uptown was worse than during midday because it was now rush hour—which was a misnomer: The traffic crawled. Nevertheless, Tolliver arrived at Christ Cella before Shelley Drake did, taking a seat at the small bar and ordering bourbon on the rocks.
This was a man’s joint, and he wondered whether that had been a subconscious reason for his choosing it. The restaurant had bare wood floors, dark walls, snotty waiters, and the best steaks in New York. But the food wasn’t important; he’d have a drink with the reporter, find out whether she could tell him anything of value, and leave.
When she showed up, however, his attitude eased—considerably. As she checked the trench coat, he saw that instead of one of the business suits she’d invariably worn when he saw her on TV, she had on a frilly blue dress that hugged her body and revealed gentle curves. Her face seemed softer, too, the blue of the dress complementing her eyes. She joined him at the bar, saying she’d have whatever he was drinking.
Evidently, she made an impression on some of the other patrons, as well. Men stared as they recognized her, taking in the familiar mane of honey blond hair and the wide mouth. Tolliver didn’t blame them; she’d stand out anywhere, on or off the tube. He told the bartender to bring her a Jack Daniel’s over ice.
When the drink was placed in front of her, she raised her glass. “Cheers. I’m glad we could get together. May I call you Ben?”
“Sure.”
“I’m Shelley.”
They touched glasses and drank.
“I told you I could give you some valuable information,” she said.
“We’ll see.”
“Hey, come on. You made your feelings clear the first time we talked. You thought I was just out to make the story on the senator as sensational as I possibly could. But that’s not true.”
“No?”
“No, it isn’t. I want the facts on all this as much as you do.”
“Then what is it you can tell me?”
“First, what about my offer? If I can help you with your investigation, will you give me stuff in return?”
“Hey, you know how it works. The department has its own public-information unit. And the rule is, everybody in the media gets the same material at once. If it ever got out that I had a side deal with a reporter, I’d be patrolling the beach on Coney Island.”
“Yes, but nobody needs to know about it. I promise it’ll stay between us. So will you give me things, if what I tell you turns out to be valuable? That’s fair, isn’t it—quid pro quo?”
“Maybe.”
“Then we have a deal?”
“It depends on what you’ve got. And here’s the kicker. If I do give you anything, you’re not to break it unless I say so.”
She chewed her lower lip, thinking about it. Finally, she nodded. “Agreed.”
“So what do you have?”
“Remember what I said that day in your car, about the senator’s weird sex habits?”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Okay. The way this got started was, I had a tip. On Senator Cunningham and his involvement with Jessica Silk. Everybody knew his reputation as a womanizer, so I talked my news editor into letting me work on an exposé. I went to the offices in the foundation, said I wanted to do a story on the senator. But I never could get to talk to him. His secretary gave me a runaround, kept fobbing me off on the administrator.”
“Ardis Merritt.”
“Right. Merritt was polite enough, but she wouldn’t let me near Cunningham, either. Every time I went there, she said she’d be happy to answer my questions, give me any information I needed.”
“So what you had was nothing.”
“That’s what my editor said. I had to fight like hell to keep going on it. The thing was about to get canned when the senator died. But the minute I heard he was with Silk at the time, I knew for sure there was something there. It still wasn’t anything so
lid, but what saved it was the notoriety surrounding his death. And now Silk’s dead, too. Which makes me all the more sure.”
“What was the tip you had?”
“It came from a writer I know. She’d heard Silk was not only having an affair with the senator but at the same time she was also working on a dynamite story about his abusing young women. He didn’t realize what she was up to, of course. I thought, Wow, wouldn’t that be a shocker? That’s why I went to my editor and got him to let me go back to work on it.”
“What did you know about Silk?”
“Only what I’d heard in the business. She had a reputation not just for writing juicy stories about well-known people but for putting herself into the situation.”
“Making the news as well as writing it.”
“Right. Vanity Fair loved her. So did New York magazine. Did you see the article she wrote on the William Kennedy Smith rape trial?”
“No, what about it?”
“She went to Palm Beach and got herself involved with that crowd of yo-yos who hung around Au Bar and Bradley’s. She was sleeping with one of them while she was writing the piece. Supposedly, it was in Palm Beach that she first met the senator. The family has a winter home there.”
“And that’s why you figured the story on her and the senator could be true.”
“Yes. I don’t know what went on in his office that night, but I’d bet my life it wasn’t what the family said.”
“Ardis Merritt claims she was in the office, too, at the time. That would make her the only one still alive who actually saw what happened.”
“You think she told the truth?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. But I think it was all just a cover-up, concocted by the family to shield the old man.”
“That’s possible.” Shelley Drake was turning out to be not only beautiful but smart. He decided to let her in a little further on what he’d learned. “There were some holes in Merritt’s story, and in Silk’s.”
“Like what?”
“They said that when Cunningham was stricken, they loosened his clothing to get him some air.”
“Okay, so? Oh wait—I get it. Maybe what they actually were doing wasn’t loosening his clothes but trying to get them back on. Right?”
“Exactly.”
Shelley continued to stare at him for a few seconds, then raised her gaze to a point somewhere above his head.
“Forget it,” Ben said.
“Forget what?”
“Doing anything with that.”
“Yeah, but—”
“But nothing. I can’t prove it. And that’s been the whole problem with this, from the beginning. No proof.”
“It fits, though. No wonder the family wanted to hush it up.”
“Uh-huh.”
She was looking at him with those large, serious blue eyes. “So what do you think, Lieutenant?”
Ben drained his glass. “I think we better have another drink, and then I’m going to buy you a steak.”
26
They sat upstairs, at a corner table. The room was just as gloomy as the ones on the first floor, but apparently the customers didn’t mind. They seemed to take the restaurant’s less-is-more attitude in stride, putting up with the dingy decor and the quaint no-menu service as long as the slabs of beef were the thickest and juiciest you could find in the city. The ratio of men to women was about three to one, and Tolliver began to wish he’d suggested a place with less of a saloonlike atmosphere.
The lack of grace didn’t appear to bother Shelley, however. She waded into her medium-rare sirloin with baked potato and broccoli au gratin like a starved lumberjack. “Amazing, isn’t it,” she said, “that the senator could be getting away with it? An important public figure like him?”
“Not so amazing,” Ben replied. “If it’s true. People with money and political power often decide they can make up their own rules.”
“Good point. As a matter of fact, look at what’s been going on in Washington. Not only were a bunch of those characters forcing themselves on women but Congress actually passed a law exempting its members from being accused of sexual harassment.”
“Sure. Their attitude is, they don’t work for the government, they own it. But that’s not where Cunningham developed his habits, if what you’re speculating is correct.”
“No, it has to go back a lot further than that. From what I’ve read, there are two schools of thought as to just how far.”
“Freud, and the geneticists.”
“Which side are you on?”
“Both. You care for some wine?”
“I’d love some.”
Ben signaled a waiter, and when the man came to their table, he ordered a bottle of Burgundy.
After the waiter had departed, Shelley said, “You’re on both sides? Now you’re the one who sounds like a politician.”
“Maybe I do, but there’s plenty of evidence that genes have more to do with sex than just determining whether we’re male or female. They also influence sexuality—whether we turn out to be straight, gay, or psychopathic. The genes provide the raw material, which has to be there first. And then environmental factors influence the direction we follow after that. So Freud was also right. But it takes both.”
“Then you can imagine what traits the senator inherited and what kind of upbringing he had.”
Ben thought of the background material he’d read. “I don’t know much about that, except that his grandfather started the family fortune. The Colonel was one of the robber barons, along with people like Jay Gould and John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt. He cheated people out of their deeds on gold and silver mines in Colorado, and then he came to New York and bought acres of Manhattan real estate. That’s why the holding company is still called Cunningham Mining Corporation.”
“Fascinating.”
“Isn’t it? He was one of the biggest slumlords in the city at one time.”
“Is that so?”
“Sure. After he bought all that land he owned in Manhattan, he put up tenements, tracts of them. They were terrible places, many even without plumbing. Then he packed the buildings full of immigrants, with whole families living in one or two rooms. He charged them exorbitant rents, but they couldn’t complain, because there was no one to complain to. No rent commission existed, and everybody in the administration was for sale.”
“And that’s what the real estate company grew out of?”
“Right. Eventually, all the tenements were sold off at tremendous profits because of the value of the land. Some of the money went into other developments, mostly office towers. And the profits from those operations are what funded projects like the Manhattan Medical Center. The Cunningham PR machine is always beating the drum about how wonderful the family was to build it, but what they don’t mention is that as a private hospital, it’s free to make as much money as possible. So it’s always been a cash cow, and now more than ever. If you’ve followed what’s been going on with medical costs, you know they’ve gone through the roof.”
Shelley shook her head. “I think it’s all amazing. When you dig into the Cunninghams, you find so many skeletons. The family is nothing like what they’d have you believe. There’ve been stories about every one of them.”
“Such as?”
“Such as Clay, the senator’s son. He’s been in a string of scandals, but the senator’s influence kept most of them quiet. His first wife divorced him years ago. Now he’s married to Laura Bentley, the actress.”
“Yes, I know.”
“His sister, Ingrid, who runs the real estate company? When she was a student at Foxcroft, she ran away with a guy twice her age. The old man tracked her down and then sent her to Switzerland, supposedly to a private school, but I hear it was actually a sanitarium. She’s been married three times, and the first two ended in very messy divorces. Her current husband is a con man who calls himself a financier. He skipped out of Munich after running a Ponzi scheme
on investors.”
“I’m familiar with him, too. What do you know about the senator’s widow, Claire?”
“Heavy drinker … but then, all of them are. She was married to someone else when the senator first knew her. Supposedly, she was after his money. Altogether, the Cunninghams make quite a group.”
“Just your typical all-American family.”
“It’s a little different from their image, isn’t it? Even now, most people have no idea about what they’re really like—or what the truth about the senator was.”
The waiter returned with the wine, and as he opened the bottle and poured some for Tolliver to taste, Ben thought about what Shelley had told him. It was true; even after his death, Cunningham was protected by his power and his wealth.
When their glasses had been filled and the waiter again left them, Ben said, “But whatever has gone on in the past is nothing compared with what’s coming up. With the old man dead, there’ll be a struggle to get control of the family fortune. No matter how the senator’s will locks money up in trusts, they’ll all be at each other’s throats.”
“No doubt.”
He thought again of what he’d seen in the files. “What else do you know?”
“That’s about it. Getting anything more than public information on the family is tough. It’s like there’s a wall around them.”
“So I’ve seen.”
“They’ve got their own security force, you know. Headed by a man named Evan Montrock.”
“I’ve met him.”
“From what I could learn, they have an estate on Long Island. The family goes out there on weekends, although Ingrid spends most of her time in Connecticut at her horse farm.”
“But Clay and Laura usually go to the house on Long Island?”
“Right. And Claire, of course. The place is huge, from what I can gather. I’d love to know what goes on out there, but Montrock and his troops keep people from getting near it.”
“Where is it?”
Flesh and Blood Page 16
